Greensboro RecordGeorge McLaughlin, left, and Richard Barber recall participating in the Greensboro sit-in while college students. Below, left to right, Joseph McNeill and Franklin McCain, two of the four leaders of the sit-in, Billy Smith and Clarence Henderson sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. Richard Barber and George McLaughlin read calmly and intently from their physics and engineering textbooks each day in near-total silence.

But this wasn’t the library at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, now North Carolina A&T State University, where they were students. This was the Woolworth’s store in downtown Greensboro, which had refused to serve black people at its lunch counter, like so many establishments in the segregated South.

The two men, now in their 70s and living in New Jersey, were among hundreds of students who joined a sit-in begun by four college freshmen a half-century ago on Feb. 1, 1960. The protest, considered a defining moment in the nascent civil rights movement, was standing-room only, and held in whispers.

“It was pretty silent. The students spoke in low voices,” McLaughlin recalled. “We were studying while standing. You didn’t yell across the store; you could be accused of disturbing the peace.”

McLaughlin, who lives in New Brunswick, and his longtime friend Barber, who settled in Franklin Township, said today’s anniversary brings back the stiff-legged feeling of waiting in a line for an hour, just for the chance to sit on one of those lunch counter stools.

The sit-in followed the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott, both in 1955. The Greensboro protest stretched into weeks, drawing support from local black high schoolers and a white women’s college nearby. It sparked other sit-ins across the country, involving more than 50,000 students by the end of April, and led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

One store alone in Greensboro wouldn't much matter, but the five-and-dime was a ubiquitous presence in communities across America, and Woolworth's
corporate officers took note said Clement Price, a history professor at Rutgers University.

Buffeted by sit-ins and boycotts at many of its outlets, Woolworth's changed its policy in July of that year. Other chains would follow.

While the courage of the first four men to sit down has been duly appreciated, Price
said, the students who followed - people like Barber and McLaughlin - were every bit as important to the movement's success.

"Their struggle would have unraveled had not other students followed in their footsteps." Price said. In any kind of struggle, the question is whether anybody will follow those who lead the way, and one of the lessons of the civil rights movement is that the people who lit the spark didn't know if people would follow. And of course there were scores of students who followed."

Woolworth's in Greensboro closed its lunch counter after about a week But stu- dents continued to file into the store until the overflow spilled out into the street, turning into silent marches.

Their quiet protests weren't always well received.

Out on the sidewalk, Barber recalled how a middle-aged, nicely dressed white woman approached. then elbowed him off the curb and into the street. She did not speak, he said, and simply kept walking,

"She had a stern expression on her face, a frown," he said. "I thought she was trying to provoke me, but you don't know whether po- lice will perceive it as you initiating the bump."

At the time of the Woolworth's protest, Barber and McLaughlin said, they had little idea it would come to be seen as an event of such historic significance. Today a section of the Greensboro lunch counter sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and the store itself has been turned into a museum commemorating the civil rights movement.

Back then, Barber and McLaughlin were aware only of the unspoken expectation for black students at their school after that first sit-in: Never miss a class, and when you're not in class, be at that lunch counter.

In the 1970s, Barber, a business consul- tant, got back in touch with McLaughlin, a dentist, after both had moved to New Jer- sey. They are dose friends who attend the same Baptist church in Somerset, annual Super Bowl parties and Rutgers women's
basketball games.

Some memories of segregation are still painful. The men, who both grew up in small Southern farm towns, don't like to talk about how they dodged swerving cars, how white hecklers spit the "N" word at them as they walked to elementary school each day. They don't like to remember ducking the rocks hurled out the windows of school buses by white children.

They were too afraid to retaliate. But at that Woolworth' s lunch counter, Barber and McLaughlin said that for the first time, their silence felt strong.

"It was almost like being in the library," McLaughlin described. Our main purpose was to make sure that we were not noisy, that we were not disruptive. It wasn't out of fear, it was out of respect for the movement, Our only confrontation was to be passive - to say nothing, nothing at all."